Intercultural Management Quarterly Integrating Culture and Management in Global Organizations
Summer 2005 Edition Volume 6, Number 3
Inside this issue of IMQ... Multicultural English Proficiency: A New Model for Global Considerations by Stephen Soresi The Role of Dreams in Cross-Cultural Adjustment by Skye Stephenson Surviving the 5 Ds by Donatella Lorch Book Review: Mark Ashwill’s Vietnam Today by Nilar Chit Tun
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Intercultural Management Quarterly (IMQ) is a publication of the Intercultural Management Institute (IMI) at American University. IMQ is a forum for experts in the field of intercultural management to share their knowledge with a broad audience interested in intercultural issues. IMQ is produced with the active involvement of faculty, graduate students and alumni of American University’s School of International Service. INTERCULTURAL MANAGEMENT QUARTERLY: www.imquarterly.org INTERCULTURAL MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE: www.imi.american.edu
From the Editor
New Directions
With this issue, we move in new directions in many ways. You’ll notice from the insert sent along with this edition that IMQ is moving in an exciting new direction. We hope that you will carefully read this letter and join us in celebrating IMQ’s successes. Of course, we also hope that you will elect to continue supporting and receiving IMQ as we continue to be a leading publication in the field of intercultural management. This issue contains several articles which push the literature of the field in new directions as well. Stephen Soresi introduces a bold new approach to teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language, termed the Sentences Per Minute (SPM) approach. His article challenges many of the field’s underlying normative assumptions and makes a strong case for the adoption of a revised approach to teaching ESL/EFL. Skye Stephenson tackles similarly groundbreaking territory in her article, “The Role of Dreams in Cross-cultural Adjustment.” She analyzes the results of her study of the role of dreams in cross-cultural adjustment, providing fascinating and thought-provoking observations about this as yet under-studied topic. In an article dramatically describing the effects of reentry, Donatella Lorch recounts her experience of returning to the U.S. after serving as a foreign correspondent in Africa and reporting on the genocide in Rwanda. Her article discusses not only the difficulties of reentry, but also the frustrations and experiences of being separated from one’s home culture and the host culture. And Nilar Chit Tun reviews Vietnam Today: A Guide to a Nation at a Crossroads, a noteworthy resource written by Mark Ashwill, himself a recent contributor to IMQ. Finally, please take the opportunity to visit our completely redesigned website at www.imquarterly.org. You will find fresh content on our site in addition to more information about the new directions that IMQ and IMI are taking. Thank you for your continued interest in and support of IMQ. Best wishes, Adam Mendelson
Intercultural Management Institute Fall 2005 Skills Institutes
1. MULTINATIONAL TEAM BUILDING; September 24-25, with Lance Descourouez 2. SPIRITUALITY AND CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION ACROSS CULTURES; October 15-16, with Michele LeBaron and Ray Leki 3. PROGRAMMING FOR INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION; October 22-23, with David Bachner
IMQ STAFF Publisher • Dr. Gary R. Weaver Managing Editor • Adam Mendelson Publication Manager • Anna Lee Contributing Writers Nilar Chit Tun Donatella Lorch Stephen Soresi Dr. Skye Stephenson Editorial Review Board Dr. Gary R. Weaver, Dr. David Bachner, Brad David, Anna Lee, Annmarie McGillicuddy, Adam Mendelson, Darrel Onizuka, Sherry Zarabi
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Multicultural English Proficiency: A New Model for Global Considerations By Stephen Soresi Four hundred million people call English their native language, while 400-500 million more use English as their second language. Add the latter number to an estimated 1.5 billion or more people who are today thought to be competent communicators in English and we see that there are at least four times more non-native than native English speakers today.1 What do these numbers signify? English’s massive diffusion is naturally accompanied and enabled by a massive multi-culturalization of English. English has been adopted and is used in diverse and creative ways globally. Nigerians, Philippinos, Indians, Italians, and Argentines communicate with their own styles and forms of English. People have developed and are using regional varieties of English. These varieties are more comfortable for them and are perfectly valid for the majority of their English communication.2 One extreme reaction to such multiculturalization is to dismiss such ‘Englishes’ as ‘wrong’ because they do not conform to ‘standard’ English. Another extreme is to say that anything goes: whatever English any non-natives use is correct in its own way. Others dissect Englishes according to the degree of deviance from ‘standard English’ or from other English varieties. Still others are content to anthropologically record the various phrases and dialects that constitute the many world Englishes today. This article offers a new model to understand the implications of English’s internationalization as it relates to intercultural communication and attempts to answer the question “what makes a good English communicator in the 21st century?” That question must be delved into by those involved with not only English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) education, but also native and non-native English speakers operating on an international stage. To answer that question, this article will present a new standard that measures communicative competence while respecting the multi-cultural nature of contemporary English.
ESL/EFL Education’s Response to English’s Mass Multi-culturalization Traditional ESL/EFL education has offered only window-dressing in response to English’s mass multi-culturalization. Without altering their core educational model, most ESL/EFL textbooks now feature a few token non-native characters in their audio/visual materials who have a slight accent, but are only allowed to articulate strictly “standard” English forms. Such window-dressing masks a deeper defect. ESL/EFL education implicitly follows an outdated and normatively ethnocentric model, that the learner ought to become ‘native-like’ or as linguistically close as possible to the presumed native English speaker. ‘Proper’ pronunciation, word usage, verb conjugation, article and preposition placement are only part of the picture. The deeper pedagogical fault is this: ESL/EFL education presents English as a standard set of ‘true facts’ so that all of the learners’ efforts can be strictly and mechanically classified as ‘right answers’ and ‘wrong answers.’3 Transforming English in testing, textbooks and lessons into a complex but rigid set of rules is problematic on many levels, not all of which are discussed here. However, one of the worst implications is that for ESL/EFL students a ‘correct’ performance consists of either reproducing the terms, definitions, and explanations of a teacher or textbook or solving the “English puzzles” based on excessively strict and futile English grammar rules and their exceptions. As you’ll see in the following examples, this rigid codification of English is very convenient for testing purposes, but borders on the absurd from a functional standpoint. For example, 12-year-olds in their first semester of compulsory English lessons in Japan are taught that after the pronoun “That” is used, the next pronoun reference must never be “That”, but one must always use “It”, as in A: “Is that silly?” B: “No, it’s crazy.” (“No, that’s crazy” is portrayed as incorrect.) This is not merely a Japanese problem. Below is a practice question for The Test of English for Interna-
tional Communication (TOEIC) test taken by more than 3 million English students each year in over 60 countries that claims to be “the standard for workplace English language proficiency worldwide.”4 “Which word contains the error in this sentence? The President is faced A)with B)numerous domestic problems, each of C)which D)demand immediate attention.” The answer: “D,” because the verb is not conjugated as “demands.” This point may have relevance for someone editing a book, but should such a finite error be the factor that determines “English language proficiency?” The obvious problem is that non-native speakers are often able to correctly detect such errors on their tests, yet unable to form or comprehend such a sentence. To emphasize such finite error-detection is not only counter-productive, it puts English proficiency in a false light. In fact, native speakers might have trouble answering the above question or make a similar grammatical error. Nonetheless, the emphasis is clearly on finite codification of English and projecting its mastery as a mastery of single sentence accuracy. The excessively strict, futile and even absurd codification of English in these quizzes are manifestations of the deeper problem within ESL/EFL education. What runs so contradictory to intercultural competence is that this ideology currently mobilizes itself through exercises that encourage and enforce single sentence accuracy, when 21st century English communication skills are based instead on multisentences, a concept which I will discuss more later on. We must realize that nativelike single-sentence accuracy is basically a myth. Carefully examining transcripts of extemporaneous speech usually shows quite obviously that not even native speakers exhibit perfectly accurate grammar or word usage. Therefore, that is an impossible and meaningless goal for nonnative learners. An unfortunate side effect is that ESL/EFL teachers following this model are doomed to a career of frustration. Who benefits from the mindset of single sentence accuracy and excessive codifi Continued on page 8
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The Role of Dreams in the Cross-Cultural Adjustment of Study Abroad Participants in Chile By Skye Stephenson “I think that dreams serve a very important function, and that is to keep the individual and the culture sane.” -Bharati Mukherjee 1 “J” was a study abroad student I knew when I was director of a study abroad program in Chile. He was Guatemalan, and had moved to the United States with his family when he was eleven. At age twenty he wrote the following on his program application: “many years ago, when I was only eight or nine, I had a very interesting dream: I dreamt that I traveled around the world. The amazing thing is that little by little my dream has become a reality.” “J” recounted to me how his dreams had assisted him during his cross-cultural adjustment to the United States, and how he expected that they would serve a similar role in Chile. His story is emblematic of a frequently unacknowledged truth of cross-cultural adjustment, which is that much of the processing of cross-cultural experiences occurs in the realm of the unconscious, and is manifested in dreams. To date, there has been little mention of the role that dreams and dreaming may play in cross-cultural adjustment. While some studies of culture shock discuss how sleeping patterns alter when people enter new environments, none consider what might actually be going on in the subjects’ minds during all those hours when they are sleeping. In the dream studies literature, there are a few fleeting references to this theme. For example, in a study based on 10,240 dreams taken from 1200 subjects, the Russian Kasatkin2 found that his subjects’ dreams changed when they changed profession and/or moved to another region. Others have noted the role of stress and unresolved tensions in incubating disturbing dreams, which can occur in cross-cultural experiences (as well as experiences of many other types). Dr. Ernest Hartmann’s study of the dreams of trauma victims is perhaps the most pertinent work. He postulates that, “dreams make connections between recently experienced material and old memories; it often puts together or combines
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two different people, two different places, or two different parts of our lives.” He suggests that “the dream provides an explanatory metaphor for the dreamer’s emotional state.” He calls this type of dreams “condensation dreams” and posits that they perform a quasi-therapeutic function because they connect the emotionally charged event being processed with some memories and/or symbolic occurrences already stored within the mind, thus spreading out the excitation in the mind of the subject through the creation of these new and broadened mind connections.3 The Dream Study: To find out more concretely about the role of dreams and dreaming in cross-cultural adjustment, I carried out a study during Fall 2002 that involved thirteen semester study abroad participants in Valparaiso, Chile. They all volunteered enthusiastically to participate, and agreed to have monthly interviews and keep a dream journal. All of the subjects were between nineteen and twenty-one years of age, and five were male and eight female. They came from many places across the United States, and two were bicultural and bilingual. About a third of them had previous experiences living in cultures other than their own. They reported marked differences in their dreaming patterns, which were corroborated by their responses to a questionnaire designed to classify what type of dreamers they were.4 Common dreaming patterns and themes emerged from all of their dreaming reports. These commonalities can be divided into four distinct, yet interrelated, categories: (1) changes in sleeping patterns and “dreams of transition,” (2) Spanish language use, (3) “condensationtype” dreams, and (4) community/social dreaming. Changes in sleeping patterns during initial period of adjustment and “dreams of transition”: All of the participants except for the native Spanish speaker from Guatemala experienced marked changes in their sleeping and dreaming patterns during their initial period in Chile. About half
even began to experience such shifts before the program began. They all began to sleep significantly more than their norm for at least several weeks after their arrival to Chile. More significantly, two thirds of the group recounted having at least one powerful dream during this period of transition; even those who could not recall any other dreams could vividly describe it days and even weeks later. This type of dream I have termed a “dream of transition,” and contend that they play an important bridging role during the typically unsettling initial period in Chile. The dream themes typically linked their past lives with their upcoming and still unknown lives in Chile. Oftentimes people with whom the participants had strong emotional linkages would be portrayed, but with the added dimension of move or change incorporated. For many, these transition dreams had a comforting and reassuring tone, and several participants noted that they felt somehow better after the dream. In a few cases, however, the dream was more fraught with anxiety. Here is one example: “I was in a house, but I am not sure where. It was like a festival, but I was leaving and so was everyone else. I kept running into different people I know, including my mother and friends from school. There were also some people there I didn’t know, but felt comfortable with. Everyone seemed to be leaving, but felt good about it. Then there was a guy there, who I didn’t know, and he took my hand. It wasn’t sexual at all, it was more physical comfort.” Use of Spanish language in dreams: Many of the participants were most interested in how Spanish language use would be reflected in their dreams and seemed to consider the ability to dream in Spanish a milestone in their linguistic acquisition and cross-cultural adjustment. In most cases, a clear correlation could be made between the presence (or absence) of Spanish language dreaming and the nature and extent of the subject’s cross- cultural adjustment. While the ability to dream in Spanish did not in-and-of-itself indicate successful cross-cultural adjustment, the lack of Continued on page 5
Dreams... Continued from page 4 dreaming in Spanish (and/or minimal dreaming in Spanish fraught with anxiety by mid-semester) was indicative of individuals experiencing some delays and/or problems with their cross-cultural adjustment. The group divided into three clearly marked sub-groups based upon Spanish language use in their dreams: Little or no Spanish dreaming: Four students in the group never had a dream in which Spanish use was comfortable during their Chile sojourn. The most extreme case was one individual who never had a single dream in Spanish during the entire five-month experience. The other three did have a few dreams in Spanish, but typically they could never respond adequately in Spanish in them. At their end of program interviews, all four in this group indicated real concern and/or frustration regarding their ability to speak and understand Spanish, as well as other aspects of their experience in Chile. No prior dreaming in Spanish, acquisition during program: In contrast, there were three members of the group who had not previously dreamt in Spanish but began to do so in Chile, typically by the first or second month of their stay. “I” is emblematic of this group: in his first Spanish dream three weeks into his stay he felt very anxious because he had to ask for directions; at first he asked in English, but when nobody could understand him he switched to Spanish. A month later, he was dreaming comfortably in both languages and, in some of his dreams, his Chilean girlfriend (who didn’t know English) would speak to him in English. Overall, in their waking hours in Chile, these three individuals exhibited a notably “deeper” adjustment5 to Chile than those in the first group. Prior dreaming in Spanish, contextualization to Chile: The last four program participants all had previous cross-cultural experiences and episodes of dreaming in Spanish and/or another language. Not surprisingly, Spanish language use was embodied in their dreams differently. This was most notable in the two bilingual/bicultural students, both of whom exhibited clear contextual use of lan-
guage in their dreams. One participant who was Japanese and spoke Japanese and English fluently and was learning Spanish explained language use in her dreams as follows, “I have had a lot of dreams in which there is not one language or another in the dream, rather it depends on who appears what language we speak: I speak Japanese with my grandparents, Spanish with my Spanish teacher and English with my friends.” Dream “Condensation”: All of the participants report what Hartmann calls “condensation” dreams, in which people and/ or places from their life in Chile were linked to people, places and/or events in the United States. One of the most typical was returning to schools they had previously attended. Roughly half remembered dreams with this theme. Here is one example: “Last night I dreamt I was in high school; I wasn’t in high school but it was like I was going to take classes there soon and had to buy books. Then, all of the sudden, I was in college but I saw all these younger kids from high school with uniforms, they were sitting around in the classroom and there were kids who should have graduated already but were still in high school.” An even more common ‘dream theme’ was home, which almost every participant had at some point. Oftentimes, these ‘home dreams’ seemed to encapsulate quite emphatically the dominant emotional concerns of the dreamer. One participant had this dream three weeks into the sojourn, “I dreamt that I went home and I was in my own room but I had come home too early. My Mom was happy I was there but I said, ‘No, I have to go back, I wasn’t there long enough.’ I felt that I wasn’t supposed to be home at that time, but for some reason I sort of wanted to be home, but it wasn’t right yet.” More common than returning home were dreams in which family and/or home mixed with their current life in Chile and/or existed in a “placeless” and “indefinable” space:“In a lot of my dreams, my US family meets my Chilean family. My dreams are in a space that is not designated- it is not clear if it is in the United States or
Chile. In one dream, I dreamt of my two mothers, and even though my Chilean mother in real life can’t speak English, in my dream they were conversing together.” It does appear that those individuals who had dreams that intermixed their real life worlds of past and present, Chile and the United States, were truly more able to do this in their waking hours as well. One of the students who had a successful experience in Chile told me how she even played out cultural differences in her dreams to get “the best of both worlds.” She recounted that, “since libraries closed in Chile on weekends, I dreamt that I was in US and Chile at same time and in that way I could go to the US library to do my research.” As their time to return to the United States approached, the participants’ dream themes began to shift. Weeks before they were scheduled to leave, many who were by this point dreaming predominantly in Spanish began to dream more in English once again. Others noted that they had more dreams in which they returned home and were with parents and/or childhood friends. This phenomenon seemed to be true no matter how the subjects felt about their experiences in Chile and whether they wanted to return home or not. Community/Social Dreaming: A fourth type of dreaming exhibited by some of the participants is social or community dreaming. Hartmann described this type of dreaming by noting that, “the emotional concerns ‘in the air,’ that is, the emotion concerns of an entire society or nation, make their way into dreams.”6 Richard Russo explains that in the case of this type of dreaming, “some dreams are for everyone, not just the dreamer.” 7 Several of the participants recounted dreams of this type to me. The most common were dreams of concern for other members of the group. In one case, after a student had his cell phone stolen, another program participant dreamt, “the same person was trying to steal my cell phone, and I was chasing him. I remember going down a lot of stairs and trying to catch the thief.” In another, a recent tremor had taken place in Chile and one student dreamt that she Continued on page 11
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Surviving the 5 Ds By Donatella Lorch A New York winter can be cold and grim. But to me, in early 1996, after three years of covering conflict in Africa, it was like a prison. It didn’t help that the city was battered by one of the worst snowstorms on record. For those first few months back in the United States, I struggled with an emptiness that I nursed alone at night in my darkened living room, watching the lights of New Jersey across the Hudson River, wine in hand, deeply lonely, anxious and unhappy. I lived with insomnia and jumbled nightmares that even today occasionally intrude. I felt deeply alienated. My sister complained about my temper and constant impatience. Back then I chalked it up to missing my Africa friends and disliking my new assignment. But over the years I have talked to many colleagues who shared the same experiences and realized that my emptiness that winter was very real, just as powerful as withdrawal from any drug. We all dealt with it at different levels and in differing degrees. Some friends claim they are immune. Many say they can’t give up that thrill of being in war zones and find that life back home is just too pedestrian and boring. I was guilty of that for a few years. At the other extreme, I have watched many drink heavily and at least one slip into alcoholism, while another suffered from bouts of depression. In my decade and a half in journalism, I know of two who committed suicide. In Africa my colleagues and I joked that we covered the five Ds: the Dead, the Dying, the Diseased, the Depressing and the Dangerous. In three years there, I reported on six civil wars, genocide and massive refugee migrations. I walked over thousands of corpses. I was shot at, carjacked, arrested and contracted cerebral malaria. It was a roller coaster of intense emotions, an adrenaline high that included raw fear and anger and horror and pure, extreme fun. I loved it. I hated it. The Africa reporters were a close-knit elite, a weirdly snobby clique; we differentiated between those who had covered the genocide in Rwanda and those who hadn’t, between those who lived in Africa and those who didn’t. We joked about
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dead bodies over sushi at a Japanese restaurant in Nairobi (much to the shock of neighboring tables). Yet we took Africa very personally. Many of us were deeply angered by the West’s inaction over Rwanda. One British reporter even resigned in protest. A common litany and ingrained frustration was that our editors just didn’t understand what our lives were like and what we did to get a story. I am not quite sure why I chose to be a reporter and a foreign correspondent. My first television memories are of the Tet offensive in Vietnam- I was hooked. I must have been about 14 when I decided I wanted to write about war. It took another 13 years and many detours before I made it to Afghanistan and began traveling with the Mujaheddin guerrillas. At first, adventure and curiosity drew me there, but I remained in the field for other reasons. I felt privileged to witness and write about history as it unfolded, to become part of people’s lives and to make it real for others thousands of miles away. Sometimes I even felt I made a difference. Gradually the strands of the story weave in and around your own life and affect the way you view everything else. I have no favorite defining moment, no great incident of utter fear or sadness or happiness. Thankfully, colleagues have not been killed or wounded in front of me. The most dangerous stories are not necessarily the ones that have stayed with me. Certain events have remained as mental snapshots. And I remember smells. Take Nyarubuye. The utter quiet. Small pink and white flowers grew along a red brick wall near the church, and the dust of the dirt road smoked up around my shoes. Once it must have been an idyllic little hamlet in eastern Rwanda, but when I walked through in May 1994 it was just bodies. The church and school complex lined by those beautiful flowers was piled with corpses- about 800 of them. Two colleagues and I spent a few hours walking over them and around them, peering into dark rooms so that we could count them, mentally separating the women and little children, leaning over desiccated, broken limbs and cracked skulls to guess how they
had been killed. We didn’t talk. The smell and the stillness were too overwhelming. I’d put Vicks VapoRub on my nose and a bandanna over my mouth and tried hard to gulp little breaths. The rain had left scattered puddles, and bodies had rotted in them. It was impossible to escape that sickly, gagging stench. This place, I knew had witnessed true evil, an evil that I could see and smell. Yet it floated about, untouchable, and all I could do was take notes. Less than an hour’s drive from Nyarubuye was the paved road. There we stopped the car and did what I had done after visiting other massacres in Rwanda and Burundi: We pulled out whatever food we had and ate lunch. Months later, a British army psychologist reassured me that I was not being callous but rather subconsciously reaffirming that I was still very much alive. In The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien says there is no greater feeling of aliveness than after a firefight. I think many of my Nairobi-based colleagues expressed this by creating a small baby boom. The culture of war journalists differs significantly from that of those covering the military or law enforcement because our war lacks institutional structure. This void boosts the feeling that one is alone. Many of us created our own inner circle of on-the-road friends. After covering the genocide in Rwanda and the cholera epidemic in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Michael Skoler, a close friend and award-winning Nairobi bureau chief for National Public Radio, found it hard even to share experiences with his family. “There was no way to really share the experience, to put it into logical, analytic terms,” he said. “So the feelings never got resolved, they just sort of sat.” Especially in Goma, as he watched thousands of people die around him, Skoler said he went back and forth between wanting to help and wanting to hide behind his work. After three weeks of constant work, when his editors told him a colleague would relieve him, he found he couldn’t leave the story. Instead, without telling his wife or his editor, Skoler volunteered for two days
Surviving... Continued from page 6 in one of the refugee camps. He then returned to Nairobi and spent a couple of weeks lying in his living room, unwilling to talk or go out. Africa is still very personal and very present in his life. Years after Goma, in the incongruous setting of an ethics class at business school, Skoler said the death and destruction resurfaced and hit him with waves of emotion. One image still haunts: Amid the filth of the cholera epidemic, a tiny 6-year-old girl clung to him; she was orphaned, and aid workers said she would die unless he took her out of the camp. That would have meant taking her to his home in Nairobi. “I had a chance to save someone’s life and I walked away from it,” he said. “That image comes back a lot. I’m pretty sure I made the wrong choice.” Skoler said reporting the Rwanda story left him feeling guilty because he could go home while those he covered were caught in the midst of terror with nothing to protect them and nowhere to escape. Editors back in the States were often clueless about what we had witnessed or how it might have affected us. At The New York Times, after my stint in Rwanda, I was debriefed by a psychiatrist with a long list of abbreviations after her title. My great memory of the session, before I zoned out, was that she asked me where Rwanda was. Yet I was luckier than many of my colleagues. The New York Times went to bat more than a few times for me, turning the world of U.N. peacekeeping upside down to get me out or Rwanda, getting me the best care for my malaria. Fear is an isolating experience, one that is difficult to share. It is also an underestimated emotion. Most people experience fear in spurts, but what happens if you are constantly exposed to it day after day, night after night? Robert Suro, who covered the 70-day siege of Beirut for Time magazine, described it with awe. “It boosts your senses,” he said of the heart-pounding adrenaline. “It makes you hyperperceptive. It turns up the volume. You see and hear things much more vividly.” He believes the effects last for years. Even living in Rome, he felt constant apprehension- scanning the roads
around him, looking for snipers, avoiding untraveled routes. Living in Africa was very similar. I spent long weeks in Mogadishu, a city where you could travel only in a car with armed guards; where reporting often meant running the gantlet between warring subclans; where potholes were mined at night; where bullets pierced our hotel walls and snipers took pot shots at us on our roof. In a year and a half, six of my colleagues were killed there, several others were shot, and one was kidnapped by her driver and held several weeks. We drank heavily. Many smoked dope; at least one did hard drugs. The tension never fully dissipated back home in Nairobi, where armed burglaries and carjackings were commonplace. Even now I catch myself, for brief moments, looking for danger, wary of walking on unmarked trails because of land mines or just checking out people to see if anyone looks suspicious. And if smell can trigger memories, all I need is to catch a whiff of road kill before I remember the churches of Rwanda and the hills of Burundi. On July 12, 1993, four journalists were stoned and shot to death by a mob in Mogadishu. Accepting a last-minute flight offer, I had left the night before and headed home to Nairobi. The death of photographer Dan Eldon and the three others filled me with an overwhelming feeling of loss. Maybe it was because we had spent the evening before laughing and clowning on the hotel roof, or maybe it was because I was alive and they weren’t. Maybe it was because I always thought death wasn’t supposed to touch us. But it brought home my own mortality and underscored my fear of losing people close to me. Nearly a year and a half ago, I decided to give up the road and the wars and the adrenaline. I moved to Washington and am learning how to live in suburbia. According to a Freedom Forum-sponsored survey,1 female war correspondents drink five times as much as their counterparts in the general journalistic population. I do drink more than before I went to Africa, but I like to think that it would probably compare to a European male counterpart’s consumption.
I still miss the years on the road and the intense emotions I experienced. The stories I covered dug deep into my heart and soul. They filled me with awe when I witnessed the courage of some of the people I met. They filled me with anger over the corruption and greed of others. I became intimately acquainted with fear, desperation, cynicism and total vulnerability. They remain my companions today. Donatella Lorch is the director of the Knight International Press Fellowships, a mid-career program that sends U.S. reporters abroad to share best practices of journalism. As a New York Times reporter she covered crises in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda and Zaire. She also covered conflicts in the Balkans, Israel, Iraq and South Asia for NBC, and wrote about Africa and Afghanistan as well as the Pentagon and Justice Department for Newsweek. This article reprinted with permission, Media Studies Journal/ courtesy of the Freedom Forum. 1 The Freedom Forum. “Risking More than their Lives.” www.freedomforum.org /publications/international/europe/ptsd/ posttraumaticstress.pdf Sponsor an Issue of Intercultural Management Quarterly Would your organization like to make a valuable contribution to the study of creating better intercultural dynamics within global organizations? If so, sponsoring an issue of IMQ is an excellent way to achieve this goal. Not only will IMQ and its readership in general benefit from your contribution, but your organization will benefit as well. Included in your tax-deductible sponsorship of IMQ is a sizable amount of copies of IMQ which you can distribute in your organization in order to heighten your institution’s awareness of intercultural management issues. Your sponsorship will also be highlighted in IMQ and on the IMQ website. For more details about this program, please contact the Managing Editor at imqeditor@american.edu or at (202) 8856436.
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Multicultural English... Continued from page 3 cation of English? Standardized tests earn millions of dollars for their publishers every year. The more uniform, the easier it is to make multiple-choice questions and the more efficient, replicable and profitable for them. Large international ESL/EFL publishers benefit from excessive codification of English as well because they can publish one book to sell around the world, and the more English is codified into exact questions and exact answers, the easier (they assume) it is for teachers to teach from (and buy) their course books. Thus, profits are derived from a school of thought which codifies English into a set of digitally testable ‘facts’ so that all of the learners’ efforts can be strictly and mechanically classified as ‘right answers’ and ‘wrong answers.’ What’s worse, the typical curricula are designed to progress to more and more tricky and difficult single sentence forms. The result? Non-native learners crucify themselves trying to take it all in or spit it all out ‘properly.’ Inevitably and unnecessarily, they form lifelong inferiority complexes about their English.5 No one is saying English standards should be lowered. We just need to recognize the absurdity of, and the forces behind, the excessive codification of English and realize that such an approach to English communication runs counter to the demands of today’s intercultural communication. Just as no one demands nor achieves perfect “native-like” pronunciation, intonation, or usage of prepositions, articles or other vocabulary in extemporaneous speech, communication success is never guaranteed simply by articulating grammatically precise speech. For globally active politicians, business people, scholars, celebrities or diplomats, their communication success or failure never hinges on a single sentence’s precision or level of difficulty. Instead, their communication success can be attributed to a common trait; a trait that reveals what makes a good English communicator in the 21st century. The SPM Model and Intercultural Comunication Once we have dismissed the outdated ESL/EFL model and opened our minds to
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English’s multi-culturalization, we can begin to see new ways to qualify and quantify a ‘good’ or effective English communicator and make it clear what aspiring intercultural communicators should strive for. What are the traits shared by effective communicators globally, regardless of mother tongues? One is certainly the ability to communicate in multi-sentences. Simpler multi-sentences, not single complex sentences, are the basic global English language currency. To effectively communicate in the 21st century means to be able to produce, process and fluently exchange multi-sentences, defined as multiple sentences or a series of sentences spoken or exchanged in succession. However, one condition for spoken multi-sentences is that they must be communicated within a reasonable time frame in order for the speaker to be considered competent. Expressed metaphorically, English communication is like swimming, where people simply need solid strokes (sentences) performed in a timely manner. In other words, the key is a multi-sentence rate or fluency rate for English speakers hoping to thrive on an international stage. More specifically, fluent native and non-native English speakers produce, and/ or exchange a strikingly similar number of sentences per minute (SPM) in extemporaneous speech. They produce or exchange 18-21 SPM. This seems like a lot, but it is in fact a normal speech rate when we count longer clauses that convey new ideas. In my survey of over 2,000 speech acts, transcripts and audio from various media, I’ve found an average fluency range of 18-21 sentences per minute (I count longer clauses as one “sentence”) which quantifies fluent speech. Of course, all speech contains dysfluencies such as “uhm…” or other fillers, self-corrections, or incomprehensible fragments such as “That’s — I mean…. The…The…” Those disfluencies aren’t added to an SPM count. Also, incomprehensible sentences would not count, but this obviously depends on what we define as “incomprehensible” and from whose linguistic perspective we judge incomprehensibility. More to the point, all
speech contains disfluent or “semi-fluent” chunks, but even then, a capable communicator’s SPM never dips below 10 SPM. Thus 10-20 SPM can easily and without bias serve as a universal communication standard, which respects various Englishes. In fact, 10-20 SPM is already implicitly accepted and practiced around the world. Less than 10-20 SPM is usually not enough to communicate ideas with consistency or keep the attention of a communication partner because less than this rate is usually too few or too slow. On the other hand, more than 20 SPM exceeds normal fluency and feels too fast. This understanding of fluency is often overlooked by ESL/EFL education, which prefers to apply “fluency” to single-sentences which possess “native-like” intonation, stress and near zero disfluencies, among other things. That notion is outdated, in my opinion, and it is a standard that only professional broadcasters readily meet. In my experience as an ESL/EFL instructor in Tokyo and New York, I’ve found that exercises that seek to solidify learners’ SPMs to be extremely effective in engendering not only fluency but also communicative competence. The SPM model encompasses more than a one-way or monologic speech standard. For instance, the SPM model can be used to address English comprehension issues. A person who produces less than 10-20 SPM, would not likely be able to process a speaker exhibiting 10-20 SPM. Secondly, intercultural communication aspects as they relate to vocabulary must also be reconsidered. Less than 10-20 SPM often fails to convey ideas clearly, especially in a multi-cultural environment. It seems straightforward that comprehensibility usually increases with multi-sentences which support and explain. Here’s an example. Let’s say someone is asked “What’s your father like?” and the speaker’s intention is to communicate that her father sometimes seems to have a split personality. If English is put forth as a body of accurate single sentences and some learners feel that their efforts will be strictly and mechanically classified as ‘right answers’ and ‘wrong answers’, they Continued on page 9
Multicultural English... Continued from page 8 will obsess over the term “split personality” and yearn for a native-like equivalent. A Spanish speaker might ask “How do I say personalidad de desdoblamiento?” A Japanese person would wonder what niju jinkaku means, etc. Insisting on a translation and judging it for accuracy does little to engender lasting intercultural communicative competence. The SPM model advocates using multisentences to communicate ideas instead of assuming communication will succeed with a precise vocabulary word or other terminology. One can communicate a term like “split personality” without even having to translate that target vocabulary word as seen in the sidebar to the upper right. Even if one knew and decided to use the word “split personality,” it is not guaranteed that the listener will comprehend the term or the way that it is being used or pronounced. Effective communicators in today’s English environment do not simply use a term like that without supporting it with multi-sentences. This is true for native English speakers who chat, sell goods and services, present academic findings or communicate any other endeavors on intercultural stages. In addition to increased comprehensibility, consider pragmatic competence (conveying oneself in a manner that is appropriate). Multi-sentence fluency is employed when internationally adept speakers sincerely thank, praise, ingratiate themselves with others, apologize, reject, or persuade. Multi-sentence discourse, not words or single phrases, serve as a key to intercultural communication. The SPM model of communication is increasingly relevant due to the changes in English communication today. A quarter of the world’s population readily uses English for personal and professional needs. Entire fields have clearly established English as their lingua franca, including international politics, banking, the press, the news agencies, advertising, the recording industry, motion pictures, and science and technology,. Yet, nearly 80% of the English communication worldwide today is believed to involve a non-native English speaker. Since English has not only spread, but also been adopted in various
ways, the key to effective communication is and will increasingly be multi-sentence production and processing, which therefore should serve as a new standard to give birth to progressive ESL/EFL pedagogy and to update our understanding of communication proficiency in a world where the nature and form of English is increasingly determined by the cultural context.
An example of a multi-sentence count, which includes clauses: 1. “Guess who I saw last week? 2. When my wife and I went to Washington DC, 3. I ran into my former professor. 4. He is extremely intelligent, funny, kind and a great guy. 5. And I respect his opinion a great deal. 6. We talked and joked around for quite a Stephen Soresi currently teaches in To- while at a coffee shop.” kyo, Japan at Daito Bunka University, An example of using multi-sentences to and has authored 12 widely used ESL/ support or replace the sentence, “It EFL books and other learning materials. seems like my Dad has a split personalHe welcomes readers’ comments at ity.” My Dad’s an interesting person. soresi@edup.net 1 Figures based on research & estimates Usually he’s very quiet. He doesn’t talk to strangers. put forth by Crystal, David. 2003. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English He never asks directions. Language.Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- But sometimes he’s really, really talkative. sity Press, 2003. 2 It’s weird. Honna, Nobuyuki and Yuko Takeshita. “English Language Teaching for International Understanding in Japan.” EA Journal Vol. 18, No. 1, 2000. 3 de Beaugrande, Robert. “Liberating Education and World Englishes.” Paper Presented to the Language and Literacy Commission at the 10th World Congress of Comparative Education in Cape Town, 1998. 4 http://www.ets.org/toeic/ 5 Burns, Anne and Coffin, Caroline, eds. Analysing English in a Global Context. London: Routledge, 2001.
How w ould you assess each person’ would person’ss speech? Palestinian lawmaker Ziyad Abu Amr: “In the minds of the Palestinians, this is a defeat to the occupation. And I think this will go in history as an important conclusion, that occupiers can only be forced to end their occupations.” We can look at this as containing errors (1) “…defeat of the occupation,” 2) “..go down in history…”) or we can see it as solidly conveying an idea with three solid consecutive sentences. Furthermore those three sentences were articulated in 17 seconds, or a rate of 12 sentences per minute. Another example; Mr. Ghazi Hamad (Editor in Chief, Al-Rissalah): “He want just to give us only Gaza. We want the West Bank and Gaza as one geographical and political unit. Now the Palestinian factions, if they feel this is kind of a trick and they’re cheating the Palestinians, they will continue attacks against Israel. This bloodshed will not to stop.” We can look at the three or so mistakes or understand that this interview chunk communicates its message because of its five multi-sentences spoken smoothly in about 20 seconds, which is a rate of 15 SPM. Lastly, Ms. Rana Farouk Al-Fara (Molecular Biologist): “If you think the Middle East is the source of terrorism, of hatred, of instability, then all what the Middle East needs is a normal life, where we don’t have to worry about food or worry about movement or worry about the future.” Counting sentences here is a challenge, but the meaning is conveyed thanks to Ms. Al-Fara’s multi-sentences. She creates the context for us to understand phrases like “worry about movement.” These transcripts are from Weekend Edition Sunday: June 19, 2005, “Palestinians Await Changes in Gaza”, reported by Julie McCarthy, and are available at http:// www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4709606.
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Book Review Review by Nilar Chit Tun
Vietnam Today By Mark Ashwill with Thai Ngoc Diep Intercultural Press, 2004. 188 pages. Written from a historical and cultural perspective, Vietnam Today is a valuable resource for travelers, students studying abroad, and those thinking about conducting business in the country. While ordinary guide books structure lists of do’s and don’ts, this book is for the insightful and intellectual. The book can be read by referencing particular chapters depending on the audience and situation or in a few hours straight through- ideal reading during a plane ride to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. Mark Ashwill’s main objective throughout the book is to provide information to break down the misunderstandings between the United States and other Western countries and Vietnam, and to see how and where the different cultures can find a substantial meeting point. Also contributing to the book is Thai Ngoc Diep, a Vietnamese citizen educated in both the US and Vietnam who has a first hand perspective on how the Vietnamese see foreigners. This is seen especially in the chapter discussing the conduct of business in Vietnam. Core cultural dimensions are discussed in a clear manner by “taking a closer look at Vietnam as a collectivist society in which the group takes precedence over the individual.” Notable themes include basic descriptions of individualism and collectivism, indirect communication, and non-verbal communication. Examples of indirect communication given from both perspectives are particularly helpful to understanding the intricacies that are often puzzling to foreigners. For example, while a Vietnamese may say, “That is a very interesting view point,” the correct interpretation of the statement may be, “I don’t agree,” “We need to talk more about this,” “You are wrong,” or “We don’t like it.” While most reading the book only have the vantage point of a Westerner, this part of the book attempts to deter potential arguments and misunderstandings between Westerners and Vietnamese. While it is a laudable
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effort, many times during travel such interpretations can only be learned through the actual experience of being in the situation. The author points out several Western stereotypes that arise on arrival to the country, such as, “some men having abnormally long fingernails by Western standards. No, they are not being effeminate; they are making it clear that they are not manual laborers.” The descriptions are clear and vivid throughout the book, allowing for those that are familiar with Vietnamese culture to identify with the descrip-
tion, but still allowing for new readers to enjoyably gain insight beyond rote encyclopedic facts. In each chapter anecdotes, surveys, and quotes are interspersed between informative essays, preventing the reader from being bogged down by any monotonous lectures about cultural standards, something many travel books are guilty of. History plays an important, yet not an overbearing role in this book. A synopsis of Vietnamese history is presented with an emphasis on the different countries that invaded it: China, France and the US. The US is treated fairly, and the author uses statistics in lieu of subjective opinions to clarify this difficult point in history. Ashwill makes good use of this opportunity to clarify facts about the war that have often been misconstrued in history books and
in the media. The chapter on “Working with the Vietnamese” is an essential set of rules for anyone conducting business in the region. All of the typical issues a visitor to Vietnam might encounter from introductions, the proper exchange of business cards, issues of punctuality, and the use of interpreters are all cleverly discussed. Negotiating is also emphasized, as the “Vietnamese are skilled negotiators and are fully cognizant of the fact that time is on their side…having a long history of negotiation in times of war and peace.” Ashwill makes a point for visitors to,“try not to be too ‘Vietnamese’ in your behavior. This will only arouse suspicion and distrust…as with all international negotiations…maintain a sprit of respect, trust, and cooperation.” Historical and cultural allusions peppered with added examples create a colorful picture of what to expect in the Vietnamese business environment. A useful compendium of ten principals for working in Vietnam is presented at the end of the chapter, which is an excellent reference for future Western investors or entrepreneurs. I found the chapter on “How Vietnamese See Westerners” as a very effective and at times comical way to explain cultural stereotypes. This chapter presents the good and bad impressions that foreigners have held about the Vietnamese who have worked with them. The author makes good use of quoting local nationals and the criticism is directed at all foreigners, not just Americans. Other topics of discussion in the chapter include Vietnamese likes (“open minded and accepting of criticism”), dislikes (“rude, arrogant and they can’t curb their temper”), and other common problems that occur with foreigners. I felt that after having read this book, I could visit Vietnam and extensively enjoy the cultural and historical surroundings and not offend the locals in the process. The comparisons and quotations are insightful and the appendices in the back Continued on page 12
Dreams... Continued from page 5 was helping another survive the earthquake by holding up a column in her house that was collapsing. Several also had dreams with strong and fear-provoking images related to the events of September 11th, 2001. The most interesting, and most enigmatic, was a dream of perhaps the ‘strongest’ dreamer in the group, someone who typically recalled several dreams a night and sometimes carried out lucid dreaming. Even he, however, could never explain the following dream, which he claimed was totally different than any he had ever had before. In it, there was an 18-year-old Chilean mother holding a baby and she was hitting and abusing the child over and over; the dreamer got mad at her for doing this and began to explain why it was wrong to treat her child in this way. How might we explain this dream? While there are various interpretations that could be proposed, all representing a certain truth, I would like to raise the possibility that this person might have been picking up on the historical memory of the place; what Jung termed the collective unconscious, or what Robert Moss more directly terms “the spirits of the land.”8 Perhaps the dream embodied in some way the eighteen years of human rights abuses that occurred during the period of military rule in Chile; maybe the dreamer was picking up on the unspoken terrors that had occurred decades earlier along some of the same streets that he walked in 2002 as a study abroad student. Relevance of dream use for the study of cross-cultural adjustment: As this study’s dream material demonstrates, participants’ dreams were intricately interwoven with their waking experiences while in Chile: each affected the other. Incorporating this reality into our understanding of the cross-cultural adjustment process can serve several purposes. At a minimum, simply acknowledging that dreams may be involved in the process pushes the frontiers of our understanding into arenas not currently taken into account and gives us a broader and more complex view of crosscultural adjustment. In a quite different way, dream work can
serve as a portal to certain aspects of the 1Epel, Naomi. Writers Dreaming. New host culture that participants might not York: Vintage Books, 1994, 166. have otherwise been cognizant of. In some 2 Van de Castle, Robert. Our Dreaming cases, it might be useful to discuss how Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994, dreams tend to be perceived by members 362. of the host culture(s) as one aspect of 3 Hartmann, Ernest, Dreams and Nightcross-cultural orientation. It might even mares: The Origins and Meaning of be possible in certain circumstances for Dreams. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, study abroad students to discuss their 2001, Chapter 4. dreams with host families and friends, thus 4 Called the “Boundary Questionnaire” creating an interesting topic of communi- and developed by Dr. Hartmann, it meacation that could serve to bridge cultural, sures the “thinness” or “thickness” of inlinguistic and/or personality differences. dividuals’ boundaries between their own For those willing and able to actually waking conscious self and stimuli that work with participants’ dreams, this tech- arises from beyond themselves. nique can prove powerful in several ways. 5 Stepehenson, Skye. “Beyond the Lapith Just talking about dreams can open up av- and the Centaurs: Cross-cultural Deepenenues of dialogue and communication be- ing through Study Abroad.” In Rockin’ in tween study abroad students and program Red Square: Critical Approaches to Instaff that can be very nourishing and af- ternational Education in the Age of Cyfirming. Participants’ dreams can reveal berculture, ed. Walter Grunzweig and Nana much about what is going on in their minds Rinehart, 85-104. Piscataway: Transaction and hearts, and can provide an avenue for Publishers, 2002. In this chaptrer, the auassessing areas of anxiety as well as areas thor coined the term cross-cultural deepof progress and growth. Concrete activi- ening to indicate: “a perceptual shift in ties such as encouraging students to main- the subject such that he/she is able, at the tain dream journals, carrying out collec- same time, to consider the same event, extive dream groups, and/or assisting in the perience or belief from the vantage point processing of dream images of emotional of more than one cultural intensity via various dream work tech- framework….Thus, cross-cultural deepenniques are just some of the methods avail- ing presupposes the ability to encompass able for incorporating dream work into the two or more differing realities within onecross-cultural adjustment support pro- self simultaneously.” 6 vided by program staff. Hartmann, 63. Much more can and should be done to 7 Russo, Richard, “From the Editor.” study the role of dreams and dreaming in Dreamtime, Spring 2005, 3. cross-cultural adjustment, as it is a fertile 8 Moss, Robert, Dreamgates. New York, and fascinating ground for future research Three Rivers Press, 1998, 69. and investigation. While dreams per se are by no means the sole key to cross-cultural adjustment, incorporating the role and significance of dreams and dreaming into the process of cross-cultural adjustment can increase our understanding of the greater process itself as well as provide new ways of supporting and guiding program participants during their specific cross-cultural sojourns and greater life journeys. Skye Stephenson is author of The Spanish-speaking South Americans: Bridging Hemispheres (Intercultural Press, 2003) as well as other articles and chapters related to cross-cultural relations and international education. She is currently Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at SIT Study Abroad, and has lived and worked in Latin America for more than a decade.
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Book Review ... Review...
Announcing the Inter cultural Manag ement Institute Intercultural Management Associates Program
Continued from page 10 are a more vibrant version of an encyclopedia. However, if you are looking for a book with maps, restaurant recommendations, and hotel information, this is not the book for you. The focus throughout the book is the Vietnamese people, their culture, and their reaction to Western ideals. The book does an excellent job of maintaining a critical yet constructive view of both Western and Vietnamese cultures as they meet and interact. Vietnam Today is a good example of how a travel guide should be written for the educated consumer, study abroad students, and business travelers.
You are invited to formally join us in the education and discovery of intercultural management and training at American University. Become an IMI Associate and receive the benefits of being more closely involved with the Institute by receiving: -a one year subscription to IMQ and free e-copies of IMQ upon request; -10% off all IMI workshops and conferences (this does not include Skills Institutes, which are considered academic courses through the School of International Service; also, 10% discount is in addition to any other discounted rates); -the IMI Update, which contains information about current trends and events in the field of intercultural communication, as well as announcements from fellow Associates and links to related intercultural web resources.
Nilar A.Chit Tun is a graduate student at American University's School of International Service with a focus on International Communications.
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